Michael Batson

I recently took a bus from Phnom Penh to the provincial town of Kratie or Krong Kracheh, northeast of the Cambodian capital on the banks of the Mekong River, a journey of about 250kms by road. Cambodia is one of the few countries I’ve travelled in where road travel is often easier, faster, and more comfortable on dirt roads than on sealed ones. I’ve seen roads in Cambodia so riddled with potholes the constant jarring gave me a headache, where there seems nothing left of the original road surface, or roads broken and some patch-repaired so many times they resemble the moonscape. By the route I took, about half the road to Kratie needed resurfacing or basic construction, so I would not advise travelling with anything fragile, as it might not survive the journey.

I bought a ticket from the bus station near the Central Market (Phsar Thmei). It opened in 1937 and was once the biggest market in Southeast Asia and is an architectural wonder. Previously a hive of activity the bus station now seems quiet; the line of ticket booths reduced to two women seated at a desk looking at their phones, selling tickets to buses that mainly leave from elsewhere. I am glad to have done much of my travelling before the advent of mobile phones, back when people still spoke to each other and you were not aurally assaulted by whatever bite-size snippet captures people’s attention on hand-held devices. The latest insult is people listening without the headphones provided, so you can wind up in some cacophonic scrum of largely insufferable nonsense.

From the Central Market station, you can get a bus to anywhere in Cambodia, at least that’s how it used to work. At the appointed departure time my “bus” arrived. It was a tuk-tuk, the traditional kind, not the LPG-powered Indian-origin version now common in Phnom Penh, which drove me the five minutes to my “bus” parked nearby on Street 63. I climbed into the minivan with everyone else already there waiting for me. The minivan was a Toyota Hiace of recent vintage, not the overburdened, well-worn and busted Hyundai or Mercedes varieties often seen in these parts. My seat companion asked how much I’d paid for my ticket before informing me I’d been overcharged. It is seemingly the plight of the traveller in some worldly parts to be overcharged, like a form of unofficial tax.

The road out of Phnom Penh to Kratie goes over the Tonle Sap River on one of the new Chinese-built bridges, one they seemed not to have finished yet. The Tonle Sap is a unique waterway for in the wet season it changes direction - a feat you can witness if you get your timing right - to flow north instead of south, forced by the waters of the Mekong to fill the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. The original bridge out of the city is the Japanese Friendship Bridge, built in the 1960s and still in use having survived war and the forces of nature, at least so far. The Chroy Changva Bridge, as it is also known, was once destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and out of action for about 20 years until 1994, much like the rest of the country. You then head out on Route 6, the main road north to the tourist town of Siem Reap, then swing east on Route 7 before hitting Route 73, the road north to the Lao Democratic Republic or Laos (“Louse” as foreigners call it). At least that’s the way you should go according to the map except that our driver took the back roads avoiding the main highways most of the time. What this revealed was the perilous state of Cambodia’s road infrastructure.

I don’t think land transport speeds have increased in all the time I’ve been travelling to Cambodia. Cars have gotten faster, roads have been sealed and broken down again, and bridges built where once there were ferries, but the average travel time is about the same, and it’s slow. Someone recently described traffic in different countries as being like this: the UK is fast and organised; India is fast and disorganised; while Cambodia is slow and disorganised to which you can add dangerous, especially at night. At least four people on average are killed and 11 injured every day due to road accidents in Cambodia. In the first nine months of 2022, there were 1,342 deaths and 2,004 serious injuries from road traffic accidents according to the National Road Safety Committee. The Interior Ministry gives the main cause of traffic accidents as speeding, followed by neglecting to give way and not driving on the right side of the road. You can throw in wandering pedestrians and their livestock, parked vehicles and assorted roadside furniture including wedding parties using marquees blocking lanes, among others.

Kratie town is the capital of Kratie province, Cambodia’s seventh largest by area, sixteenth largest by population and one of the least densely populated. To the west it borders the provinces of Kompong Thom and Kompong Cham; to the east Mondulkiri, and to the south Tbong Khmum, past those is Vietnam. In colonial times Kratie was regarded as Cambodia’s frontier. The adjoining province of Stung Treng, to the north, had been lost in the 18th century to the Kingdom of Champassak, and the provincial town of Stung Treng was, the French said, “the first village of Laos.” Strung Treng returned in 1904 when French Laos traded the province to the French Protectorate of Cambodia in exchange for Champassak, leaving a small Laotian minority in Cambodia. Before the French, Cambodia existed between two spheres of foreign influence, with a history of invasion and occupation by both; Thailand to the west and Vietnam to the east. The line of demarcation was the Mekong River, with Kratie in the middle.

At Kratie, the expedition of the French Commission for the Exploration of the Mekong, which had set out from Saigon in June 1866 with the aim of finding a route to Yunnan, exchanged their steamer for canoes “going bush”, and regarded this as their true point of departure. In the countryside French companies later ran big plantations, mainly rubber, that they had developed on concessions during the 1920s-1930s in the so-called “Redlands” (because of the soil) of Kratie (also in Kompong Cham and Kompong Thom). In the post-colonial years of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, Prince Sihanouk’s “Buddhist Socialism” experiment; rubber and rice were the pillars of economic development. The future leader of the Khmer Republic (1970-75), Lon Nol, who had earlier made a name for himself as a magistrate with the French colonial service as a hatchet man and efficient enforcer of French colonial rule against anti-colonial disturbances, was once Kratie’s provincial governor.

Then the Cold War came as a hot war to Cambodia, starting in the northeast near Kratie. From the late 1950s, Republic of Vietnam troops crossed the frontier in pursuit of communist forces in a string of such operations, the most serious of which was the so-called Strung Treng incident of 1958, which aggravated border issues between the two neighbours and caused Sihanouk to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. It also made for bitter relations between Sihanouk and South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Ding Diem. Kratie Province was later heavily carpet -bombed by B-52s during the American War in Vietnam especially under Operation Menu (March 1969-May 1970), so-called as the five stages were called Breakfast through to Dessert. The decision to bomb Cambodia without declaring war or informing the American public or their representatives, was made by the US president on a Sunday afternoon, after having been to his church.

The dropping of defoliant and aerial bombing severely damaged the big French-owned plantations. There was also drought in 1969, which further reduced rubber production in Kratie at the end of the Khmer Republic - led by the now General Lon Nol. Conditions in the countryside from US bombing were intolerable. An eye witness recalls seeing “houses broken, burnt and bombed, coconut and sugar palm trees shattered, bamboo clumps and mango trees dried up and withered with shrapnel.” Kratie came under Khmer Rouge control in 1970, the first area to be administered by the Cambodian communists. The Khmer Rouge state was organised into six zones and subdivided into numbered regions. Kratie was designated an “autonomous zone” as region 505 and placed under more direct control from the ruling politburo.

Most people in Kratie are subsistence farmers, the economy heavily reliant on rice and fishing. There is still rubber production, some gold mining, but livelihoods are threatened by illegal logging, often carried out with complicit authorities. Roading is poor, so getting about is difficult. Pre-pandemic there was some eco-tourism. A few tourists would pass through the town north to Laos, and fewer still through the highland provinces of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, some headed to or from Vietnam. Kratie is rural as is most of Cambodia where 90 percent of poverty lies.  Rural poverty is entrenched, the countryside has been barely touched by economic growth in a severely imbalanced economy. There is one economy for the capital and the port of Sihanoukville with its international connections, and another for the rest of the country. The rural economy is almost wholly divorced from the urban economy, except for the export of its surplus labour.  Cambodia has a huge gulf between the few very rich and the many poor, which hasn’t changed since before the Khmer Republic. Despite the changes of government, institutional corruption and traditional absolutism remain. Cambodian’s attitude to those in power is largely summed up by the idiom, “same bus, different driver.”

When I first visited Kratie a few years back, the town wasn’t on the main electricity supply network. The provincial governor refused to hook-up the province’s electricity system to a national grid, despite offers from both the governments of Laos and Vietnam to join theirs.  This was because the governor had extensive private business interests in the supply and distribution of diesel generators, which the local population – provided they can afford to pay – was forced to run in order to have electricity. Following decades of war, destruction, and isolation from the 1970s to the 1990s, international planners and Khmers alike believed Cambodia had to be resurrected not just reconstructed, but corruption has dogged almost every effort to reform Cambodia’s institutions

My first choice of hotel, Sorya (Sory A or “Sunrise”) Guesthouse was full. My old school preference in Asia, and just about anywhere else for that matter, is always to turn up and see if I like a place first before buying. Hotels are usually grouped together with plenty of choice in these parts, so after window shopping you can make your selection. If you don’t like what’s on offer or if it's full, find another. Sorya is on Preah Soramarith Quay, the riverfront road, upstairs from the convenience store with the same name. and comes complete with a retro aviation theme. There are model planes and historical travel posters – ‘Caribbean fly BOAC’ and pictures of New York. The rooms are classified economy, premium economy, business, and first class according to price, with everything under USD30. The rooms look clean and comfortable though the ones on the top floor adjacent the restaurant maybe noisy. The Sorya’s restaurant (Pete’s Pizza) menu is somewhat limited offering pizza and a small selection of Western food only. Aside from food, drinks, and accommodation, the Sorya offer ecotours with trips to see the famous Mekong dolphins, and the flooded forests.

With no room at the inn, I went next door to the Le Tonlé Guesthouse. Its full name is the Le Tonlé Tourism Training Centre, run as a vocational training facility and offering 12-month courses in hospitality for disadvantaged local youth – orphans mainly. Located in a large three-story building previously occupied by a tour company, it is a fledgling guesthouse and restaurant, though there was no sign of the latter. They were just setting up not having been in the building long the young Khmer woman on the front desk explained, with a brilliant smile. Previously, they were a block down around the corner on Road 3. The forecourt was full of motorbikes, a bar also not set up, pot plants and business signs, all to be done. I was the only guest on the top floor up flights of precariously steep stone steps more like climbing a ladder. As a warning, stairs get steeper with each ascending level, and often come in a standard width except for one, which being set narrower can trip up the unsuspecting. The trainees had some of the other rooms on my level, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. All the doors on the level squeaked, including mine, so when they were talking and in an out of each other’s rooms there was the constant sound of crying hinges, “doors not happy”, one observed.

With no restaurant at Le Tonlé, I made the trek next door to Sorya and got talking to the staff and to the owner, Borei. A local from a village up the road he had travelled to Europe, around Southeast Asia, to Australia and to New Zealand. “I wanted to see snow in New Zealand’s South Island” he told me. “We went by campervan but there was none. Then one morning we woke up near Queenstown and there was snow everywhere.” He explained he had had a café in Kratie before the Sorya site came up for rent. They completed all the renovations for the guesthouse three months before Covid. “At first we thought the pandemic was a joke,” he said, “then everything closed and lockdown.”

On the back of the pandemic, they now appeared to be doing good business. There were mainly French tourists of mixed ages coming through for a night or two each. In the mornings after breakfast, the guests would head off on a truck loaded with kayaks for the various tours. By lunchtime they were back for more food looking weary, sweat-soaked and a little sunburned. The Sorya offers bus tickets for the next stage of the trip north to Strung Treng and Laos, south to Phnom Penh, or northwest to Siem Reap, whichever way the visitors are heading usually following their guidebooks or these days, the online advice. The best feature at Sorya and undoubtedly its selling point, are the views from the restaurant over the river and the sunsets. Sunsets in the tropics come on quickly, can be brilliant and always brief, a mere 30 minutes and they are gone. The silhouette of palm trees and pitched roof tops appeared darkened against a fiery sky and then the darkness descends.  In Cambodia given its largely a rural country with few urban centres, the night is pitch black.

During the day you can sit in the restaurant and watch Kratie go by. The mundane in Cambodia can be fascinating even photogenic. I watched the motorbikes with their various loads and passengers. There are aid vehicles, usually white SUVs, plying the streets and outside offices displaying flags of Japan, Germany, US, China, and Muslim Aid – there being a Muslim minority in the countryside with schools and mosques. Trucks go by loaded with trees, plants and flowers. In the West you go out to buy your garden requirements, whereas in the tropics they come to you. On the river by day there are fishing boats and sand dredges working the river. Some of the sand is carried to the river bank in front of town to be trucked off, presumably for building or roading, though the latter seems hardly to receive any benefit from this.

From the river pier the ferries ply across to the opposite bank and to some of the islands - the Mekong being such a force of nature it has made its own islands. Opposite Kratie town is Koh (or Koah) Trong, an island big enough to be cultivated, have roads, and home stays. Every evening on the riverside promenade about one hundred or so mainly women gather for jazzercize some in matching lime green lycra. The music, some of it vaguely resembles Western pop hits, pumps out at great volume, can be heard from far away and goes for about an hour. At the 90 Degrees coffee shop on the riverside, Kratie’s young with some money to burn sit about on their phones, like much everywhere else absorbed in the palm of their hands, even when in groups. Many appear to be students who seem to have come for the wi-fi whereas I’m there for the caffeine and the air-conditioning.

Kratie is a market town with an abundance of government offices including customs and excise (curious given how far Kratie is from any border), land management, agriculture, water resource, taxation (the most modern expensive looking structure), and my favourite, the Ministry for Cult and Religion. There is a market, Phsar Sammak Kratie, a hive of activity which spills out into the surrounding streets. The original structure near the bus station is in the distinctive so-called New Khmer Architecture, constructed in the great era of urban development in Cambodia from 1955-1970, often seen by some who lived through it as Cambodia’s Golden Age or “Sihanouk-time”. Foreigners in the market are still rare enough to be a novelty so you get a few looks and whispers here and there and plenty of smiles. After all, this is Cambodia. I got a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. The driver was engrossed in his phone complete with a live feed and accompanying electronic pings following every posting. When I asked what he was watching he said it was from Thailand, where some Khmers were involved in a traffic accident and the boys in brown, the Thai police, had just arrived.

On that first visit here, I went on a motorcycle tour across the river to Koh Trong, on to see the endangered Mekong dolphins, and later Phnom Samrok, a retreat for Buddhist monks, a hike up many steep steps leaving my shirt soaked in sweat. My tour guide then was the only Khmer I’ve ever met who was bigger than me. His bike struggled under our combined weight. There was a World Cup on then and I recall watching matches looking out at tropical sunsets to the tune of a hundred diesel generators, the sky punctuated with mighty flashes of forked lightening. This time I decided to hire my own motorbike for the princely sum of USD7 a day (for 24 hours) from a small guesthouse on Road Number 3. The young Australian woman working behind the counter took my passport and in exchange I got the keys and a helmet that was about three sizes too small. When I asked for directions to Sambour and how far it was she said something about a roundabout and 12kms, waving her hand in a generally northerly direction.

It sounded good enough for me, so off I went north along Preah Soramarith Quay and left at the roundabout and on out of town past the Tela petrol station along the road with houses on either side and the Mekong to the left. The Mekong is a bit hard to miss, though from the bank it can be hard to see where it ends given the islands that dot its course but easier in the wet season, which had passed when I arrived. The tell-tale signs of the river’s changed depths told by the detritus of plastic left high up in trees and other vegetation along the way, depressing really, given how humans have polluted such a wonder. Every time you look at the river you seem some piece of plastic or polystyrene floating by.

The Mekong is the 12th longest river in the world at 4,350km (the Nile is the longest at 6,650km) and third longest in Asia (the Yangtze is the longest at 6,300km). The water volume in the Mekong increases 45-fold from the dry to the wet season. It has 850-plus different species of fish (second only to the Amazon), with 279 being unique to the Mekong including the giant catfish (which can grow up to 300kg – checkout Jeremy Wade on the show ‘Rover Monsters’), giant stingray, soft-back turtle (the heaviest known specimen was 250kg), Siamese crocodile (with the only known wild population left being in Cambodia), and the smooth coated otter. There are also many native land animals including deer, mongoose, and primates and bird varieties such as kingfisher woodpecker, vultures, and hornbill. The latter can be seen in the urban environment in Phnom Penh from time to time usually atop buildings.

The Mekong River from the Laos border to Kampi in Kratie province is a unique eco-habitat containing a series of small flooded forests, countless everchanging sand islands and is home to the Irrawaddy dolphins. This stretch of river has nine deepwater pools up to 80m deep (the main river floor is from 5-20m deep), these are rare geomorphological structures where fish congregate and breed and are considered environmental conservation areas. At 3,600sqkms in size, Prey Lang Forest (on the western side of the Mekong) is Southeast Asia’s largest lowland evergreen jungle. The forest is home to 45 percent of Cambodia’s bird species, 33 percent of the country’s bat species, 538 different types of plants, as well as 80 percent of the most endangered indigenous tree species and 55 threatened animal species (including gibbons and Asian elephants).

Then there are the Irrawaddy freshwater dolphins, named for another great river. I was taken on a viewing trip the first time I came here. Sightings then I have to say were fleeting, not sooner had they popped up above the surface than they were gone. They are big with bulbous heads, not my view of the traditional dolphin. Irrawaddy dolphins can be identified by their dorsal fins, which are unique to each animal, and much like the individuality of a human fingerprint. Official counts vary, but the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimated in early 2021 that there are 89 Irrawaddy dolphins left in Cambodia, with the largest population of around 40-50 living just north of Kratie in a deepwater pool at Kampi, and the rest spread over eight deepwater pools stretching north from Kampi to the Laos border. Irrawaddy dolphins are among the most endangered species on the planet. There are also subpopulations in freshwater rivers such as the Ganges and the eponymous Irrawaddy, and they have been seen from the Bay of Bengal to Borneo, New Guinea and the Philippines. Laotians and Cambodians have a common belief that the Irrawaddy dolphins are reincarnations of their ancestors. Fishing is a threat to the dolphins, especially blast fishing, and while there are regulations prohibiting this in Laos, there are none in Cambodia. The dolphins are also caught in trawl nets. Muslim Khmers have been known to eat them for food. The dams on the Mekong are another threat, not just where the dams are to be situated – upstream of the dolphin’s core habitat, but in the explosives used for construction.

In January this year, it was reported that Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, instructed Kratie and Stung Treng provincial administrators from the border with Laos to Kratie to protect the dolphins by zoning the habitats and playgrounds of dolphins into protected zones to prevent activities that pose any danger to them. People he said, were not to be allowed into these areas and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries “must ensure that the dolphins are safe and under heightened protection.” A decision welcomed by the WWF, doubtless a statement made from their office in a riverside villa just down the road from the Sorya guesthouse. The dolphins’ role in tourism and in job creation was noted by the deputy provincial governor of neighbouring Strung Treng. The problem in Cambodia is that all too often the authorities charged will protection tasks are also often the very same ones engage in illegal activities, logging of protected forests being a classic case in point.

Nearly everywhere you go in Cambodia you see school children heading along roads going to or from some school attending in shifts, either morning or afternoon. There is an almost constant stream of them in their brilliant white shirts and dark blue bottoms; trousers for boys and skirts for girls. Here they live amongst a flagging rural economy with increasing landlessness and poverty prompting internal migration and urban drift. Cambodia needs to maintain a minimum six percent economic growth in order to provide opportunities for job seekers leaving school, which the pandemic has put a massive hole in. Some of these school kids may have to move in order to provide a livelihood for themselves in future.

The Kambi road though sealed, is rough, having been patched so many times its effect is a severe juddering on machine and rider. If there was anything loose on the motorbike it would by now fall off, and if it wasn’t already loose, it was by the time the journey finished. But I was just visiting, whereas the locals have to put up with this poor state of affairs all the time. The pictures of Cambodia’s leaders by the roadside seemed to me to display those responsible for the poor state of the infrastructure. If you want to know who you should blame there they are, but you won’t get them to fix anything. Power in Cambodia is about being wealthy but also unaccountable. The riverside road was lined with houses. Hereabouts these are the traditional Khmer houses of dark wood built on piles sometimes 3m high, with a twist. The front of the house incorporates a large covered area like an open barn presumably for storage. The only roadside signs more numerous than those for the ruling political party are for Ganzberg beer, unpopular with expats but much favoured by the locals for all the competitions run offering prizes for yet more beer and sometimes money. Rumour has it though, the monetary prizes are in specially marked boxes reserved for the well-to-do, while the plebs just get drunk. So, in Cambodia even the beer is corrupt.

North of Kampi the road joins a dirt road, its red dust covering the roadside vegetation. Near houses people stood with hoses to dampen down the road surface in the hope they can stave off choking. While the air quality disintegrates, the ride is more comfortable, the dirt surface smoother than its sealed counterpart. At Sambour the Mekong widens and breaks into several channels. There is a market with fresh food. I saw a shop selling replica football shirts, and I spied a Tottenham Hotspur shirt prominently displayed. I noted a mechanics, in case the motorbike was shaken to the point of needing repair, and a pharmacy for painkillers as the road had given me a headache.

At Sambour is the 100-column Vihear Sar Pagoda, the only one boasting such an architectural feature in the country. Sambour is not to be confused with Sambor Prei Kuk an archaeological site in Kompong Thom province predating Angkor, and also worth a visit. Originally there were four temples facing all points of the compass. Legend has it that a young Buddhist monk named Nen Thon raised a crocodile as a pet that became known as “Crocodile Nen Thon”. Nen Thon had a reputation as a healer so was invited to the royal court for his services. In 1806, King Ang Chan Reachea II who ruled as King Outey Reachea III 1806-35) ordered the construction of the 100-Column Pagoda in dedication of his daughter who was swallowed by the crocodile. King Outey Reachea III was crowned king by the Siamese, who were favoured by his two brothers, though he was in fact, pro-Vietnamese. Early last century, the pagoda was struck by lightning, which caused 22 columns to burn down and the Buddhist statues to be blackened by smoke. The pagoda was then pulled down and rebuilt by the local people, but it had then only 78 columns. In 1987, the pagoda was renovated using concrete columns, and some of the original wooden columns placed inside the pagoda building. Achar Y Horng, a 72-year-old caretaker of the pagoda, says the 100-column monastery used to have between 50 and 60 tourists every day who came to visit the pagoda after they had been to a nearby resort to watch the Mekong River dolphins. Their numbers are only starting to come back after the pandemic.

I parked my motorbike rental nearby and went for a walkabout around the pagoda. Apart from anything this was a relief from all that shaking from the road trip. When I got back about 8 or 9 locals, young kids of school age, were sitting nearby intrigued by the foreigner. Nearby is the Mekong Turtle Conservation Centre, a rather rundown establishment in the grounds of a neighbouring pagoda. The centre is home to the rare Cantor’s giant softshell turtle, which was only rediscovered along this stretch of the Mekong in 2007. One of the largest freshwater turtles, it can grow to nearly 2m in length. Hatchlings are nurtured here for 10 months before being released in the wild. Aside from those Sambour has not much else. There is a market, a sports ground, home of Sambo FC, in a country where such facilities are basic, if they exist at all.

On the way back to Kratie I stopped at a roadside restaurant with hammocks overlooking the Mekong. An old lady came by selling pumpkin wrapped in banana leaves delicately packaged, she had outlived her husband killed in the Khmer Rouge years, and all her children. She lived alone across the road and whenever people stopped at the restaurant, she would come over to sell whatever she had made for a little money to keep her going. Pickings were slim. Aside from a small family group, I was the only visitor. She was skin and bone and smiled a toothless grin.

I thought I was going quite fast on the much-repaired road back to Kratie, until I was overtaken by a man riding a motorbike with two school girl passengers each sitting side-saddle facing opposite ways. The girls look completely at ease and despite the speed of the bike, with barely a hair out of place immaculate in their blue skirts and sparkling white blouses. By the time I got to Kratie they had disappeared off to the afternoon shift of classes to a school I didn’t see.

The next day Sorya had tickets for sale for the VIP van back to Phnom Penh. It was cheaper than what I paid to get there. For the privilege of paying a few dollars less, I got about five other passengers all listening to their phones without headphones, so I had to retreat to using mine to drown out the awful sounds. The driver took a route that for the most part was much smoother than the trip up but then on the approaches to Phnom Penh traffic became a crawl. The VIP van dropped me off on Monivong Boulevard, the main north-south artery that pierces the capital which has the best roads in the country. Another journey in Cambodia safely navigated.